Web design has kept evolving since the year it was born. Every year sees the birth of new trends and the death of the old yet so many people are crooked into paying high prices for people that put together sites in a simple document. What is that all about anyway!?

Web design is an art that continues to progress into modern standards that far surpass what once was. Even though businesses buy into cheap and ineffective web design projects, the most exclusive designers will always know how to create an experience for the user in the simplest and most effective ways possible that continuously brings about more traffic to a website and generates a turnaround for the business in question.

Sometimes web design can be as simple as placing text within a page and colouring it up to produce eye catching effectiveness. After all a web site and or web page IS about SELLING a product or service; or promoting the brand identity of a business.

Creating that simplicity is the hard part and that is why so many web sites fail before they are actually completed. Many companies buy into flash designs and highly creative yet ineffective web sites – ineffective only because they do not produce the designed results. It can take a company months if not years to figure out just how wring they were about the design that they approved.

The reason for me saying all of this is to simply point out that companies and even small businesses should be prepared to pay the right price for effective web design services that can be handled by professionals.

Professional web design services, whether freelance or by a company, is a must have for the serious business and I urge everyone reading this article to take into consideration that you can not and should not buy into cheap services that will not bring together the desired results for you.

Your web site is an online portal for millions of potential customers and clients to understand who you are so ensure that you find a company that will design based on your branded identity.

Beauty In Simplicity

I have always had a problem coming up with great colour schemes that can truly deliver the message of a chosen web site. It is not easy to come up with colour schemes that work and blend from one colour to the next. It is a skill that is rarely possessed by people and sometimes we need to work on it just a tad. Then there are other options such as software and profiles sites that have hundreds of people that are born with colour schemes built into them and are willing to share these with you.

First up on my list is software. I found a desktop application that allows you to create colour schemes that display wonderfully to users and are compliant with W3C standards.

Contrast-A allows users to interact with a 3-dimensional RGB colour space, experiment with colour combinations, check the contrast according to both WCAG 2.0 and 1.0 and see the results for different types of colour deficiency. Custom colour palettes can be created, printed and saved as Pdf to the user’s desktop.

My favourite feature is of course the accessibility.

Second up on my list are profiling websites. My personal favourite web site for colour schemes is Colour Lovers and the main reason is that they provide an Adobe Air Application that allows you to search their database of colour palettes right from your desktop!

There are currently 258,695 Lovers sharing 2,299,858 Colours in 1,019,281 Palettes. Lovers have scored the lovely Colours & Palettes 4,561,806 times and left 2,077,297 comments and created 660,546 Patterns.

Now more than ever, finding the perfect colour schemes and palettes for your web design projects is as easy as 1-2-3. This makes an appealing dawning to an age of an internet that is bursting with colour, creativity and most of all inspiration that transcends to host online art in its most finest form.

The rest is up to you and only you can define the future of web design and development.

As with any web design, I believe that corporate design is an art. Tailoring to the needs of your clients exposes a need to fulfil the desire of customer satisfaction. With a few all important factors and pointers in mind any good web designer can achieve amazing results for his corporate web design project.

Here are some pointers:

1) Goals Goals and Goal

Usually the first point of discussion with the teams responsible for developing the website is DESIGN. The management is too busy and wants the mock-up to be done first. This is the point where the website starts taking a shape of a monster which is beyond the control of its master. To start with just raise a simple question with your team “What is that we want our website to do?” Make list & arrange and align your answers with your organizational goal. Make this as your checklist.

DESIGN SHOULD BE THE LAST THING ON YOUR LIST.

2) Who is your audience?

Knowing as to who will be your audience helps you align your business goals well. Spend some time in researching about your target audience in terms of there demography, profession, preferences, age-group etc. This will help you in deciding about you content, design, marketing and other aspects.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE WELL

3) Don’t confuse your visitor

Do you remember any instance where you had this heady feeling of being lost on a website? Some corporate websites are great in design and content but loose on the navigation front. This leaves the visitor with a bad taste. So a well defined navigation structure is like having a clear direction and a smooth road to reach your destination. A site map can be a good guide to your website, especially if you have lots to say. Someone who quickly finds what he or she is looking for is more likely to return.

Have an easy and simple navigation and provide a site map

4) Think of the customer experience

Treat your website visitor like the way you will treat them if they walk into your office. Have clean and aesthetic landing pages for each of your product or service sections. Also make sure that you listen to them by providing the query form and phone numbers so if they don’t find anything on the website they know how to contact. Also try and create a separate customer service page for ease and understanding of your clients.

Create a wonderful customer experience online.

5) Design matters a lot.

Ok now bring out your designers and give them a chance to earn there piece of bread :). The corporate website design process should start from creating a style guide to be followed for the entire website. The idea is to keep it simple, clean and using colour where it is required. Usability is also an important aspect that should be take care off over here.

Make your design simple and functional.

6) Make it sound good

While developing your corporate website design, devote special care to the copy. Writing for web is different from print. It should have the problem-solution approach and should convey the message quickly and precisely. People don’t have so much time to read all the yada yada. If there’s too much content, it’s a good idea to split it across two pages – no one likes to scroll down too long, and never from side to side!

Keep it short and sweet

7) Browser compatibility

Ensure that your website runs fairly well on at least the popular browsers. So it will be really good to keep three or four popular browser in mind while developing the website. You must keep a good amount of time for testing the website.

Site should work well with at least the popular browsers.

Have an error page (404)

The idea is to have a custom 404 page because it makes to let your user know that they have reached the right site but may not be the right page. Ideally place a query form there and link to the site map, so that they can place a query or go to the desired section. Also place a link to the home page prominently.

Design a custom 404 page

10) Help me with the 10th one

The tenth tip is to ask your stakeholders, existing customers, external consultants to have a ring side view of the proceedings. Believe me it helps a lot.

Some good corporate website design examples are:-

1) Microsoft 2) SAP 3) Nestle 4) Barclays 5) Sony

Web Evolution is yet another Proniit Online Media and Marketing Site. I have developed this site to share design ideas, design trends and watch with the world as the internet grows into something magnificent.

There is only so much one person can do yet that little can go a long way. I find thousands of useful developing ideas, scripts, icons and themes everyday and I want to do is share it with you.

Take time to subscribe to this site follow me on this journey as we discover or rather, re-discover the web together.